John Mount puts together an idea:
As of now (late 2026) LLM (large language model) technology providers, users, and work products flood the public commons. It therefore makes sense to have even a primitive mechanistic mental model of these technologies. You are forced to have an opinion. Without a mechanism or model one tends to fall into disempowering anthropomorphic language. Some clear thoughts on this can be found here and here.
In this note I would like to try and outline a (very) simplified mental model of LLM mechanics and mechanisms. By “mental model” I mean a cartoon to work through in your mind, not a model of the LLMs as having their own mind. I won’t be teaching the history of LLMs, how to build them, how to use them, or their moral or philosophic implications. I will only try to give a very rough outline how the current (2026) LLMs work.
Click through for an intuitive explanation of how they work.